What are the most common title words in technical communication publications?

While titles are an important component of scholarly and trade publications, they have been understudied within the field of professional and technical communication. In particular, the field has not empirically analyzed the titles of publications within our discipline. Such empirical study can present a clearer picture of how our field has evolved and what are the theoretical and practical tenets of our discipline. In this study, we begin to explore these issues. First, in a corpus that includes the title of every article published in the five major technical communication scholarly publications and the one trade publication between 1996 and 2013, we determine what the most common words used within titles are. We then determine what words are unique to scholarly publications or trade publications. Finally, we explore how the common words have changed over time.